Europeana Website Overwhelmed on its First Day by Interest of Millions of Users

On the first day of its launch on 21 November 2008, Europe’s digital library Europeana was overwhelmed by the interest shown by millions of users in this new project. On the basis of expert advice, Europeana had anticipated up to 5 million hits per hour on the site.

The real interest was 3 times as strong. This massive interest slowed down the service so much that after having already doubled server capacity yesterday at noon, the Europeana management in The Hague (Netherlands) and the European Commission last night had to temporarily take down the site to take pressure off it. This is an unexpected difficulty, but it is also an encouraging sign that citizens in Europe and around the world have great interest in Europe’s digital library. It also provides strong motivation for the Europeana team and the experts from the Commission working on the project to intensify their efforts and the site’stechnical back-up even further. Europeana must now be made more robust to deal with peak hour requests as they happened yesterday – thousands of users searching in the very same second for famous cultural works like the Mona Lisa or books from Kafka, Cervantes or James Joyce. The European Commission and the experts from the Europeana project are working on this day and night to make a fully functional Europeana service available as soon as possible. The Commission and the Europeana management are confident that Europeana will be up and running again by December. For the time being, a demo version of Europeana will be available at http://dev.europeana.eu/.

Europeana rolls multimedia library, museum and archive into one digital website combined with Web 2.0 features. It offers direct access to digitised books, audio and film material, photos, paintings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and archival documents that are Europe’s cultural heritage. Visitors to www.europeana.eu can search and explore different collections in Europe’s cultural institutions in their own language in virtual form, without having to visit multiple sites or countries.

Europeana offers anyone interested in literature, history, art or cinema a simple route to access European cultural resources. For every citizen, it offers a simple way to find cultural material from across Europe in digitised format. Europeana is also expected to attract students and researchers with its vast virtual collection of material from all  disciplines. That said, it will be just as easy for school children to use it, for homework or for fun.

Europeana functions like a multimedia Internet portal with content from different sources. The digital objects that users can find in Europeana are not stored on a central computer, but remain with the cultural institution and hosted on their network. Europeana collects contextual information about the items, including a small picture. Users will search this contextual information. Once they find what they are looking for, a simple click provides them with access to the full content –inviting them to read a book, play a video or listen to an audio recording – that is stored on the servers of the respective content contributing institutions. Cultural institutions collaborating with Europeana organise their digitised content in such a way that this search is possible. At the same time they keep full control over their content.

First, the cultural object has to be digitised. Digitisation is the transformation into digital format of text and photos from paper, films from reels, music from vinyl or videos from tape, so it can be (dis)played and used from a computer. For text and photos this involves scanning. Then the cultural institution that has digitised the object has to make it available for search and retrieval through Europeana. To make it searchable from a single entry point, the institution has to add the right contextual information to the digital object, such as the name of the author/ creator, the place and date of creation, etc.

 The Europeana prototype gives direct access to more than 2 million digitised items from museums, libraries, audiovisual and other archives across Europe. Over 1,000 cultural organisations from across Europe have provided materials to Europeana. The digitised objects come from all 27 Member States, although for some of them the content may be very limited at this stage.